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This once 'Blessed Isle'
Common SenseJohn Maxwell
Sunday, August 05, 2007
The trouble with party manifestoes is that most people don't read them and those who write them quickly forget about them. The classic is the PNP manifesto of 1997 - especially the section on the environment that turned out to be a road map for doing almost exactly the opposite of what was promised. But that was a different prime minister and another century.
John Maxwell
I have just been reading the JLP's manifesto for the coming general elections and it is the best one they have written in years. The problem is - are they any more likely to do what they promised than they or the PNP have done in recent years?
Historically, the only manifesto which was actually applied systematically was the PNP's 1954 'Plan for Progress' which was based on the 1944 'Plan for Progress' the basic problems of Jamaica having remained the same over the years.
The 1964 PNP programme was, loosely, the basis for the Michael Manley administration of the 1970s, but sometimes it seemed honoured more by accident than by design.
It was therefore with a certain sense of dread that I approached the 2007 JLP manifesto, published on Monday. The great theme of the Jamaica Labour Party this year has been their determination to change course. Unfortunately, since both parties are wings of the same ideology there isn't much room for changing course, except in style.
Both parties have always promised to root out corruption and this time the JLP has proposed specific means to make this possible, but other than that, I am afraid, this manifesto is one which the PNP could simply re-label and publish as its own.
The main fault of this manifesto and no doubt of the coming PNP version is that it is to be 'Business' (with a capital B) as usual. There are the expected promises to be tougher on crime, on the importation of guns and on police misbehaviour. But nowhere in the manifesto is there any realisation that Jamaica's problems are anything but economic.
The market forces have triumphed and the class war is over. At least, that's the theory. Development is the buzzword to end all buzzwords and we are promised (as the PNP has also promised) to make life, government and the economy more business friendly. This will no doubt continue to be the mantra even if the whole world economic system runs into a crashing speed bump within the next few weeks - if not days -and the supply of 'boopses' will be considerably reduced.
Reading the JLP manifesto (and I will bet, the same is true of the PNP's to come) there is no clue that the world is on the edge of several precipices; the escalator is coming to a halt.
The reasons are fairly simple. The market cannot solve anything, any problem, because the market is driven by the acquisitive instinct. It is every man, woman and child for him or herself.
This giddy bacchanal of wealth "creation" is simply the more efficient extraction of what old Karl Marx called 'surplus value' produced by the labour of helots and abstracted for the greater good of Remy Martin and Rolls Royce.
In the meantime, the vast majority of the world's people live (if that word is appropriate) on less than the cost of a patty per day, scavenge for a living or work at 19th century sweatshop wages, are badly fed, indecently clothed and shamefully housed.
Millions of children sleep on the streets like pariah dogs, millions more die from 'belly-workings' gastroenteritis caused by bad food and worse water. Malaria and HIV/AIDS decimates the populations of the Third World and war completes the destruction and demoralisation of those unlucky enough to live above underground reservoirs of oil.
In Jamaica the statistics on the availability of clean water remain at the level they were 30 years ago.
Crime festers in the dark and dangerous hovels to which the poor are condemned, and the Jamaican 'economic man' is what 50 years ago was called a 'mint-stick' man, desperately trawling the streets for a pittance.
But looming over all this is the threat of climate change and petroleum as expensive as gold.
Even in the notoriously oil squandering USA alternative energy produces about five per cent of the energy they consume. In Europe the proportion is higher and moving higher fast.
We must know something that they don't. Instead of building ferociously expensive new superhighways they are increasingly putting money into public transportation and education and turning to solar energy (wind farms) and photovoltaic energy generation to replace the soon to be unaffordable oil.
And they are also making huge efforts to conserve energy: California wants to mandate 50 mile a gallon motorcars within a decade. We like Hummers and Prados.
Losing Portmore and Savanna-la-Mar
It doesn't seem to have occurred to any of our political leaders that people want to hear about their plans to deal with global warming. Living as we do in the eye of the hurricane zone, we have adopted, in official circles, a devil-may-care attitude, hoping perhaps, that prayer and prophecy will turn away the wrath of the wind and the rain. In Cuba they have long had an institute for the study of hurricanes and Caribbean weather. And their emergency response systems are recognised by the Red Cross, among others, as second to none in the world.
In this area, Haiti has a good excuse. The market has decapitated their democracy and they are leaderless and demoralised. Perhaps we are too, but I didn't think so.
But hurricanes are seasonal, climate change is not. It will turn the seasons topsy turvy. Where I live the night-time temperatures are what one should expect in November/December. And the May rains now come, if at all, in July. Our water supplies are inadequate, as the JLP manifesto points out, but it doesn't point out that bauxite mining and housing development and Doomsday Highways threaten to make them even less adequate.
Low lying areas like Portmore, Savanna-la-Mar and downtown Kingston will be lost to sea-level rise.
Floods and droughts will become more severe, attacking our agriculture. Since our agriculture is based on producing food for foreigners, we will continue to depend on wheat and corn from the United States at increasingly higher prices. We could grow much more of our food here. We were almost self-sufficient during World War II when salted codfish was just about the only significant food import. We produced enough corn in 1945 to be able to export some of it and the fields now left barren by bauxite once produced all kinds of ground provisions and vegetables for Jamaican tables.
In 1919 the Jamaican farmer produced 20 tons of butter for the elite of Kingston.
We could do that and more again. Make our own cheese and all kinds of other products which ordinary Jamaican farmers used to find no difficulty in doing.
When we talk about planning it's about 'BIG' developments. A new airport at Vernam Field - as if Norman Manley will survive sea level rise; we will not stop sand mining in St Thomas, so that sea levels will find it easier to destroy the Palisados and rid us of our airport in one storm.
Losing Falmouth
Sea level rise will also further contaminate the coastal aquifers, already damaged by bauxite mining and alumina processing. We will then turn for water to the Cockpit Country, of course, if that hasn't been destroyed by bauxite mining.
The JLP and the PNP both have proposals to make a big attraction out of Port Royal if, of course, it survives sand-mining and sea level rise.
And the really big plans are as usual, for the benefit of the merchant classes. The people are not asked if they want to give up their beaches or precious towns like Falmouth. No. The Port Authority and the Tourist Board have a better idea. Build a massive cruise ship pier at Falmouth, destroying the environmental resources, which help feed the fish and us, and destroying the recreational space we so desperately need, as was planned at Hope Gardens.
It does not seem to have occurred to anyone that the Jamaican environment is what keeps us alive and destroying it for cruise ships or whatever other lunatic enterprise, will doom us to misery - either by starvation or rebellion.
How can we tolerate 13,000 tourists a day in Falmouth when the cruise ship pier goes up? The tourists will bring nothing to the Jamaican people; what they spend is siphoned off by the in-bond shops and other "attractions" which are simply licences to print money for export while the population looks on in miserable frustration. Their land and their space is being usurped, their town is being taken away, and they will have no say in it and pretty soon, they won't be able to enter it.
Having built Falmouth and other treasures and maintained them for 500 years, we are to lie down and yield these jewels to people whose only salient qualities are their wealth and their arrogance.
The Port Authority deserves and will in time, be seen to have earned monumental ignominy. As the world shrivels from the lack of oil, the Port Authority smashed the corals off Port Royal to allow bigger and bigger ships, destined to become obsolete within a decade or two.
The Port Authority completed the destruction of Kingston Harbour that, 40 years ago, was the world's single most productive marine property, supplying reasonably priced protein and allowing unbounded recreation.
Today, the filth in Kingston Harbour is complemented by the toxic waste which the Port Authority have dredged up and redistributed for the greater affliction of Portmore.
Nobody cares.
Please don't read this as a critique of the JLP manifesto. It is a critique of our national bourgeoisie's attitude to development.
Development, according to the world's leaders at Rio in 1992 and reinforced by other declarations since, is the development of the people by the eradication of poverty while ensuring that their voices would be authoritative and their interests paramount in the new dispensation.
In a country blessed by the sun, where no one can physically be more than 25 miles from the sea, we continue to think in terms of concrete and steel instead of flesh and blood.
"Rock stone a ribber bottom neva know sun hot."
Copyright 2007 John Maxwell
jankunnu@gmail.com
Common SenseJohn Maxwell
Sunday, August 05, 2007
The trouble with party manifestoes is that most people don't read them and those who write them quickly forget about them. The classic is the PNP manifesto of 1997 - especially the section on the environment that turned out to be a road map for doing almost exactly the opposite of what was promised. But that was a different prime minister and another century.
John MaxwellI have just been reading the JLP's manifesto for the coming general elections and it is the best one they have written in years. The problem is - are they any more likely to do what they promised than they or the PNP have done in recent years?
Historically, the only manifesto which was actually applied systematically was the PNP's 1954 'Plan for Progress' which was based on the 1944 'Plan for Progress' the basic problems of Jamaica having remained the same over the years.
The 1964 PNP programme was, loosely, the basis for the Michael Manley administration of the 1970s, but sometimes it seemed honoured more by accident than by design.
It was therefore with a certain sense of dread that I approached the 2007 JLP manifesto, published on Monday. The great theme of the Jamaica Labour Party this year has been their determination to change course. Unfortunately, since both parties are wings of the same ideology there isn't much room for changing course, except in style.
Both parties have always promised to root out corruption and this time the JLP has proposed specific means to make this possible, but other than that, I am afraid, this manifesto is one which the PNP could simply re-label and publish as its own.
The main fault of this manifesto and no doubt of the coming PNP version is that it is to be 'Business' (with a capital B) as usual. There are the expected promises to be tougher on crime, on the importation of guns and on police misbehaviour. But nowhere in the manifesto is there any realisation that Jamaica's problems are anything but economic.
The market forces have triumphed and the class war is over. At least, that's the theory. Development is the buzzword to end all buzzwords and we are promised (as the PNP has also promised) to make life, government and the economy more business friendly. This will no doubt continue to be the mantra even if the whole world economic system runs into a crashing speed bump within the next few weeks - if not days -and the supply of 'boopses' will be considerably reduced.
Reading the JLP manifesto (and I will bet, the same is true of the PNP's to come) there is no clue that the world is on the edge of several precipices; the escalator is coming to a halt.
The reasons are fairly simple. The market cannot solve anything, any problem, because the market is driven by the acquisitive instinct. It is every man, woman and child for him or herself.
This giddy bacchanal of wealth "creation" is simply the more efficient extraction of what old Karl Marx called 'surplus value' produced by the labour of helots and abstracted for the greater good of Remy Martin and Rolls Royce.
In the meantime, the vast majority of the world's people live (if that word is appropriate) on less than the cost of a patty per day, scavenge for a living or work at 19th century sweatshop wages, are badly fed, indecently clothed and shamefully housed.
Millions of children sleep on the streets like pariah dogs, millions more die from 'belly-workings' gastroenteritis caused by bad food and worse water. Malaria and HIV/AIDS decimates the populations of the Third World and war completes the destruction and demoralisation of those unlucky enough to live above underground reservoirs of oil.
In Jamaica the statistics on the availability of clean water remain at the level they were 30 years ago.
Crime festers in the dark and dangerous hovels to which the poor are condemned, and the Jamaican 'economic man' is what 50 years ago was called a 'mint-stick' man, desperately trawling the streets for a pittance.
But looming over all this is the threat of climate change and petroleum as expensive as gold.
Even in the notoriously oil squandering USA alternative energy produces about five per cent of the energy they consume. In Europe the proportion is higher and moving higher fast.
We must know something that they don't. Instead of building ferociously expensive new superhighways they are increasingly putting money into public transportation and education and turning to solar energy (wind farms) and photovoltaic energy generation to replace the soon to be unaffordable oil.
And they are also making huge efforts to conserve energy: California wants to mandate 50 mile a gallon motorcars within a decade. We like Hummers and Prados.
Losing Portmore and Savanna-la-Mar
It doesn't seem to have occurred to any of our political leaders that people want to hear about their plans to deal with global warming. Living as we do in the eye of the hurricane zone, we have adopted, in official circles, a devil-may-care attitude, hoping perhaps, that prayer and prophecy will turn away the wrath of the wind and the rain. In Cuba they have long had an institute for the study of hurricanes and Caribbean weather. And their emergency response systems are recognised by the Red Cross, among others, as second to none in the world.
In this area, Haiti has a good excuse. The market has decapitated their democracy and they are leaderless and demoralised. Perhaps we are too, but I didn't think so.
But hurricanes are seasonal, climate change is not. It will turn the seasons topsy turvy. Where I live the night-time temperatures are what one should expect in November/December. And the May rains now come, if at all, in July. Our water supplies are inadequate, as the JLP manifesto points out, but it doesn't point out that bauxite mining and housing development and Doomsday Highways threaten to make them even less adequate.
Low lying areas like Portmore, Savanna-la-Mar and downtown Kingston will be lost to sea-level rise.
Floods and droughts will become more severe, attacking our agriculture. Since our agriculture is based on producing food for foreigners, we will continue to depend on wheat and corn from the United States at increasingly higher prices. We could grow much more of our food here. We were almost self-sufficient during World War II when salted codfish was just about the only significant food import. We produced enough corn in 1945 to be able to export some of it and the fields now left barren by bauxite once produced all kinds of ground provisions and vegetables for Jamaican tables.
In 1919 the Jamaican farmer produced 20 tons of butter for the elite of Kingston.
We could do that and more again. Make our own cheese and all kinds of other products which ordinary Jamaican farmers used to find no difficulty in doing.
When we talk about planning it's about 'BIG' developments. A new airport at Vernam Field - as if Norman Manley will survive sea level rise; we will not stop sand mining in St Thomas, so that sea levels will find it easier to destroy the Palisados and rid us of our airport in one storm.
Losing Falmouth
Sea level rise will also further contaminate the coastal aquifers, already damaged by bauxite mining and alumina processing. We will then turn for water to the Cockpit Country, of course, if that hasn't been destroyed by bauxite mining.
The JLP and the PNP both have proposals to make a big attraction out of Port Royal if, of course, it survives sand-mining and sea level rise.
And the really big plans are as usual, for the benefit of the merchant classes. The people are not asked if they want to give up their beaches or precious towns like Falmouth. No. The Port Authority and the Tourist Board have a better idea. Build a massive cruise ship pier at Falmouth, destroying the environmental resources, which help feed the fish and us, and destroying the recreational space we so desperately need, as was planned at Hope Gardens.
It does not seem to have occurred to anyone that the Jamaican environment is what keeps us alive and destroying it for cruise ships or whatever other lunatic enterprise, will doom us to misery - either by starvation or rebellion.
How can we tolerate 13,000 tourists a day in Falmouth when the cruise ship pier goes up? The tourists will bring nothing to the Jamaican people; what they spend is siphoned off by the in-bond shops and other "attractions" which are simply licences to print money for export while the population looks on in miserable frustration. Their land and their space is being usurped, their town is being taken away, and they will have no say in it and pretty soon, they won't be able to enter it.
Having built Falmouth and other treasures and maintained them for 500 years, we are to lie down and yield these jewels to people whose only salient qualities are their wealth and their arrogance.
The Port Authority deserves and will in time, be seen to have earned monumental ignominy. As the world shrivels from the lack of oil, the Port Authority smashed the corals off Port Royal to allow bigger and bigger ships, destined to become obsolete within a decade or two.
The Port Authority completed the destruction of Kingston Harbour that, 40 years ago, was the world's single most productive marine property, supplying reasonably priced protein and allowing unbounded recreation.
Today, the filth in Kingston Harbour is complemented by the toxic waste which the Port Authority have dredged up and redistributed for the greater affliction of Portmore.
Nobody cares.
Please don't read this as a critique of the JLP manifesto. It is a critique of our national bourgeoisie's attitude to development.
Development, according to the world's leaders at Rio in 1992 and reinforced by other declarations since, is the development of the people by the eradication of poverty while ensuring that their voices would be authoritative and their interests paramount in the new dispensation.
In a country blessed by the sun, where no one can physically be more than 25 miles from the sea, we continue to think in terms of concrete and steel instead of flesh and blood.
"Rock stone a ribber bottom neva know sun hot."
Copyright 2007 John Maxwell
jankunnu@gmail.com